Who, Me?
Honestly, I've never done this. I've never executed UPDATE Users SET Password='foo'. At least not on a production server. The QA staff's time and inconvenience doesn't count, right? And the one time I did a few stray DELETEs, I was positive I was logged into the test DB, not the production DB.
Seriously, what SQL Server really needs is some kind of option to apply WITH(NOLOCK) by default on SELECT statements, and make WITH(LOCK) an option. I've been abused by DBAs for forgetting NOLOCK so much, it's a wonder I'm still living.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Worst Acquisitions
Via Dare, I found this list of top 10 worst billion dollar Internet acquisitions. Here's an interesting thing: out of the top 10, 3 were done by Yahoo!, 4 if you count AltaVista, which was acquired via Overture, which already owned AltaVista. AOL on the other hand has only 2, though AOL itself was one of the worst acquisitions - though that was really a merger, and AOL was the lead partner in that deal, weren't they? I'm not sure whether AOL or Yahoo! is in worse shape these days, but I think it says a lot about the space that Google, or even Microsoft, didn't make the list.
I noticed Blue Mountain would have made the list, except the purchase price didn't make the cut. Don Dodge says in the comments that Blue Mountain was probably a worse investment than some of the ones in his top 10. Blue Mountain has had some tragicomic effects for Colorado, giving us in Jared Polis a man with a lot of money and political ambition, and even some good intentions, but pretty poor results. It's so bad now, they can't even agree on how to fix it. This is the problem with government by referendum - it's nearly impossible to fix the mistakes.